Story Highlights

INDIANAPOLIS — Across the last seven months, they’ve spent some-1,700 hours wedged inside a single room, eyes fixed to a screen, winnowing a pool of 13,000 prospects down to 2,500, then to 250, then, finally, to around 175.

Barring any trades, they’ll draft nine.

This is the process. Soon comes the payoff. It’s time for the NFL Draft, the weekend scouts and league personnel men grind for all year. The Indianapolis Colts, fresh off one of the best hauls of any team in recent memory – their first two picks of 2018 ended up first-team All-Pros, a first in the NFL in 53 years – enter without any glaring needs. Twenty-one of 22 starters from last year’s 10-6 campaign will return in 2019 for a team that’s young, hungry and climbing.

“Last year was last year,” Chris Ballard, the Colts’ third-year GM, said Monday. “Nobody really cares about what we did last year at this point.”(Photo: Darron Cummings, AP)

But this roster is still thin at spots, and unfinished as a whole, and remember: a franchise is always one bad draft away from sliding back into mediocrity.

Rest on their laurels? Chris Ballard isn’t buying. Not for a minute.

“Last year was last year,” the Colts’ third-year GM declared Monday. “Nobody really cares about what we did last year at this point.”

Hence the 1,700 hours he and his personnel staff have spent inside the team’s draft room since the middle of September. That’s roughly 70 full days inside a single room, grading, arguing, stacking, shifting, second-guessing, fleshing out thousands of potential picks into the less than 200 they’re comfortable with come Thursday evening, when decisions loom and all that work comes down to a few, fleeting moments.

As it stands now, the Colts’ first-round pick will come with 25 players already off the board. Ballard said his staff has identified a cluster of roughly eight players they believe could be an option for them at No. 26 – “Some of them will be gone, you hope all eight aren’t gone,” he said – but they’re facing a far more unpredictable situation than they did a year ago. Their options were a whole lot clearer when they were picking sixth overall, all-but guaranteed to land an elite prospect.

CLOSE

Insiders Zak Keefer and Joel Erickson preview this weeks draft and where the Colts look to improve.
Clark Wade, Clark.Wade@Indystar.com

But they do own three picks inside the top 59, and are still reaping the benefits of last spring’s trade with the Jets. (No. 34 overall came over in the deal that netted Quenton Nelson a year ago.) On the eve of a draft that could go a number of directions, Ballard addressed a number of topics Monday about the coming draft and how this weekend could play out:

On the talent in this draft compared with last year: “I don’t see the strength at the top of the draft that I did last year. ... I do not see the same depth that there was last year. (Former NFL personnel man) Gil Brandt made a statement the other day, I think he said it was the 17th pick – somebody could have that guy 70th on their board. Between 11, 12, 15 all the way to 70, I think it’s a matter of flavor, and who you like and who you want.”

On drafting players with potential character risks: “(In the scouting process) you want to weed out the guys you know just don’t fit, whether from a schematic standpoint, athletic standpoint, character standpoint. Let’s filter them out. It takes discipline on draft day. There’s going to be points when you’re going to say, ‘What’s the difference? He’s got first-round talent, but he doesn’t have the character you want.’ ... There’re guys who have some character risks who are on our board, but we’re comfortable with them. They wouldn’t be on our board if we weren’t comfortable with them. We might move them down, but we filter it out enough where our board is pretty clean from our standpoint. Anybody (on the board), we’re willing to take."

On weighing those character risks with building the locker room: “It hasn’t changed, no, and it won’t change. We want – you all have heard me talk about this enough, man, the locker room is important to us. I only think you can go as far as your locker room wants to take you. You’ve got to have enough talent in that locker room, but you also got to have guys that are willing to work, willing to struggle, willing to do the things it takes to win and willing to do it together. I think you have to stay consistent because the first time you think, ‘Oh man, we are this close. Man, let’s just go take a bite of the apple.’ Well then it burns you. We are pretty strict on what gets in.

“It’s our job to get it right. Are we going to be 100 percent perfect? No. And that’s even the clean ones. Even the ones you think there are no issues, you still have to dig. Whether they have an issue or not, you have to dig. And I promise you that you can’t talk to enough people. You can’t. You can’t do enough digging on each and every guy in this draft. We make it hard on our scouts. They spend a lot of hours talking to these guys, talking to friends, family, people around them, trying to get to know who they are. It’s not an easy thing to do, because when they are entering the draft, everyone wants them to do well. I get it. But finding people that will tell you the truth, really tell you the truth … and I think the more time you spend with somebody, I think you find out who they are at their core. We test our scouts to do that. Whether they are bad and made mistakes or they are good, we are still digging.”

On drafting need vs. the best player available: "You can’t force anything. If you have a glaring need going in, you can’t force it, and I think that’s where teams make mistakes. If you have a need, and two players are equal, absolutely you’re going to go with need. If there’s a spread, and we have one rated at 10, and the other rated at 35, you’re gonna take the higher-ranked player.

"This is one thing you can go through all 32 teams: how draft experts and the media have them ranked is not exactly how we have the ranked. We do it internally. We do it ourselves. We’re pretty confident in our ability – of the things we’re looking for in each position and in each player.”

On speaking with players in the days leading up to the draft vs. keeping your intentions a secret: “Every guy we draft, we’ve talked to him. Saying that, are we reaching out to them right now? Probably not. We are trying to keep the cards close to the vest. That’s why you are getting all these generic answers right now ... you all almost got me a couple of times.”